Where does your interest in economics come from? What do you like most about teaching economics?...How has blogging affected your career?...if I want to take a vacation, it’s easy to find reviews of hotels and what the best time of year to go is. Yet, if I get sick, it’s hard to learn cost of procedures, rates of complications, and quality of outcomes. Why is information about healthcare so difficult to find for patients? And where do you like to go on vacations?

My answers, of course, may be found by following the link to the interview.

I've got to say that your pet peeve about physical therapists is insane. What they actually do may not seem very complicated, but the designing of treatment plans is where the difficulty lies. You have to know which muscles oppose which (not that hard), but also have to know which nerves project where (i.e. follow the spino-thalamic tract, and all the other nerve pathways, and so on), and be aware of an large body of PT literature. This requires at minimum an already high-level understanding of biology for starters. They may be in school too long, but the idea that a high school grad could learn this sufficiently in one year is laughable. My wife is a PT and there is a noticeable drop-off in the knowledge of some older PTs, who were only required to maor in PT. (Also, I think we should expect all science degrees to require increasing time spent in school into the future simply based on the near exponential increase of data in some fields.)

However, you should know that most new PTs will be coming from 5 year BS/MPT programs, which make a lot more sense than 3 years of standalone grad school expense-wise.

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